Relevant Events

• Digital Symposium: Teaching the Middle Ages and Renaissance to STEM Students

4 December 2023

The details for the event are here.

Speakers: Monica H. Green, Kisha G. Tracy, Andreea Boboc, Alice Wolff, Juliana Viezure, Scott Manning, Kevin Moberly, Brent Moberly, Dan Mills, Eric Shane Bryan, Emiliano Gutierrez-Popoca, Ken Mondschein, Eliza Buhrer, Dori Coblentz, Brian Bowen.

• Workshop: Resources and Sustainability? Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Practices of Extraction, Reclamation and Appropriation in Past and Present

7-8 December 2023

The details for the event are here.

Speakers: Tina Asmussen, Thomas Stöllner, Simone Müller, Frank Uekötter, Timothy LeCain

• Seminar: Hidden Figures? New Approaches to Women’s Work in Early Modern Mining

22 November, 2pm London local time
Online attendance available

The details for the event are here.

Speakers: Gabriele Marcon.

• Lecture: Supplying the slave trade in 10th-century Prague

14 February 2023, 3.30pm EST
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam

Dr Jane Fontaine will hold a lecture, with Lola Digard as discussant, on the slave trade of 10th century Prague.

The details for the event are here.

Speakers: Jane Fontaine, Lola Digard.

 

• Book Launch: Death and Disease in the Medieval and Early Modern World

13 January 2023, 12pm EST/ 6pm CET/ 10.30pm IST/ 4am + 1 AEDT
Online, zoom

Begin the new year with a virtual book launch for the fourth title in the “Health and Healing in the Middle Ages” series by publishers Boydell and Brewer. Edited by Lori Jones and Nühket Varlık, the volume covers the pre-modern Mediterranean world, Christian, Islamic and Jewish medical histories.

The link for the book description here.

The link for the event here.

Speakers: Editors of the book and series speaking with Elma Brenner; Ann Carmichael; Suman Seth. 

 

• Medicine in the Medieval North Atlantic World – Online Conference

13–15 May 2021
Maynooth University, Ireland

This interdisciplinary conference explores the reception and transmission of medical knowledge between and across England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and Scandinavia during the medieval period, and will draw on history, literature, philosophy, science, religion, art, archaeology and manuscript studies. It will interrogate medical texts and ideas in both Latin and vernacular languages, addressing questions of translation, cultural and scientific inheritance and exchange, and historical conceptions of health and of the human being within nature.

Plenary speakers: Dr Debby Banham (University of Cambridge); Prof. Guy Geltner (Monash University); Prof. Charlotte Roberts (Durham University)

Organising committee: Dr Sarah Baccianti (Queen’s University Belfast); Dr Siobhán Barrett, Dr Bernhard Bauer & Dr Deborah Hayden (Maynooth University)

 

• Infectious Disease and Public Health: Lessons from History – Webinar

Thursday, 22 April, 17:00 AEST
Online

In 2020 Covid-19 reminded us all that we can learn valuable lessons from the history of infectious disease. This webinar brings together three historians of public health in very different eras and contexts, presenting historical research which can help us better understand and manage infectious disease in the 21^st century.

Guy Geltner (Monash University), ‘Public health in the premodern world: The end of an oxymoron’: The new field of premodern public health has rose to some prominence during the outbreak of Covid-19, as health professionals, policy makers and ordinary citizens became aware of the efficacy of ‘low tech’ solutions often associated with earlier, ‘unhygienic’ eras. This presentation will summarize some of the field’s key insights and how they challenge entrenched narratives of modernization and common practices of cultural othering today.

Warwick Anderson (University of Sydney) considers ‘Crisis in the Herd: A Short History of R0 and Disease Modelling’: Statistical models and simulations have recently come to dominate the framing of epidemic disease, giving us concepts of ‘waves’ and ‘flattening the curve’ – but where do they come from, and where are they directing us?

Geraldine Fela (Monash University), ‘From Condoman to Community Control: Indigenous public health, nursing and HIV in the 1980s’: As HIV spread through Australia’s gay community in the early 1980s many predicted that the virus would cause a public health crisis of unprecedented proportions in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, but this never eventuated. This paper will examine the extraordinary public health approach that was responsible for this success, an approach led by Indigenous nurses and healthcare workers and informed by the politics of self-determination and community control.

Presenter Bios 

Warwick Anderson, MD, PhD, is Janet Dora Hine Professor of Politics, Governance and Ethics in the Department of History and the Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney; and a honorary professor in the School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne.

Geraldine Fela is in the final year of her PhD candidature at Monash University. Her thesis examines the experiences of HIV and AIDS nurses in Australia prior to the introduction of anti-retroviral therapy. Her research looks at the intersection of oral history, labour history, histories of gender and sexuality and social movement studies.

Guy Geltner is a social historian of health, cities and punishment at Monash University and the University of Amsterdam. His work can be explored at www.guygeltner.net.

 

Al Thomson, Professor of History at Monash University, will host the evening and HCV Executive Officer Alicia Cerreto and Monash University’s Dr Susie Protschky will facilitate the discussion.

 

• Salutaria! Perspectives on Health and Wellbeing in Medieval and Early Modern History

Friday, 23 April, 9:00 to 16:30 AEST
Online

The preservation of health and the pursuit of wellness were major preoccupations during the Medieval and Renaissance period. This was not limited to just the body but also to the mind, the soul, the community and the environment. As a complex subject that affected everybody, the quest for wellbeing was understood and experienced in a multitude of ways. This symposium aims to explore both the changing and continuing perceptions of wellbeing during the medieval and early modern period as well as the various strategies people employed to pursue it for themselves and for others.

Keynote: 

Professor Guy Geltner (Monash University)
“Health and the Environment Beyond the Simplex of the Pre”

Speakers:

Elizabeth Burrell (Centre for Medieval and Studies, Monash University)
Dr Merav Carmeli (Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, Monash University)
Nat Cutter (School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne)
Dr Aydogan Kars (Centre for Religious Studies, Monash University)
Rosa Martorana (Centre for Medieval and Studies, Monash University)
Dr Melissa Raine (School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne)
Dr Kathryn Smithies (School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne)
Dr Richard Tait (Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Monash University)
Gordon Whyte (Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University)

 

• Centring Race in History: Antiquity to the Present (online conference)

23-25 November 2020
Organised By: International Centre on Racism, Edge Hill University, UK.
MONITOR Global Intelligence on Racism magazine, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, Italy (EUI).
Department of History & Civilization, EUI.

What should be the place of race in historiography and historical practice? The last few decades have witnessed a flowering of the historical study of race. Yet most of this scholarship has been confined to late modern colonial, global, and postcolonial histories, with little interest from other fields. In medieval and early modern studies, the bulk of writing on race has been produced by those working in literature rather than history. And if we look to the big treatments of history that have been growing in popularity in the profession and the book trade in recent years, race barely features.
The aim of our conference is to confront this marginalization of race in history, and to consider how we can centre race in our discipline: theoretically, methodologically, and empirically. We are interested in submissions concerning every period of human history, and all fields in our discipline.

Claire Weeda will present her paper “Ethnic Stereotypes: Religion, Environmental Thought and Power in Western Europe 950-1250” on 24 November.

 

• Flowing Together: A Workshop on Archaeological and Historical Approaches to Middle Eastern Water Management (7th-15th centuries)

12-13 November
Radboud Institute for Culture & History

This workshop aims to explore the various challenges, problems and potentials for collaboration between historians and archaeologists in the study of water management. Since early 2020, the NWO-VICI project ‘Source of Life’ has been combining archaeological and historical data to study the different ways in which water was managed in Middle Eastern cities and their hinterlands between the 7th and 15th centuries AD. As disciplines, archaeology and history share common aims and interests yet often produce data at different scales, both spatially and temporally, which relate to different groups of people and spheres of life. As a broad theme ‘water management’ encompasses an extremely broad variety of components including physical infrastructure, social institutions and individual actors. It is a complex task, therefore, to select which methods are most appropriate to combine, analyse and understand these different elements and the overall systems they created. The various sources of data-both material and textual-and the ways we choose to put these together affect the reconstructions of the past that we create. Through a variety of presentations exploring different case studies and methodologies that address different approaches, difficulties and best practice, this event aims to consider, critique and develop cross-disciplinary approaches to water management in the past from the combined perspectives of archaeology and history.

 

• The Testimony of History: To Live and Overcome the Epidemic in the Present

International Symposium (online)
18-19 June, 17:30-19:00 (Lisbon time)

This seminar aims to be a space for knowledge sharing on the theme of epidemics, in different geographical contexts, national and foreign, limited to the Middle and Early Modern Ages, seeking to establish a bridge between the past and the present. It will be held in two days and consists of brief presentations (10 min.) carried out by invited researchers, followed by a debate, and open to all those interested in participating.

The new coronavirus (SARS-CoV 2) and COVID-19 brought unexpected challenges to Humanity. The answer to these challenges is more than a quest for biomedical science and transcends health issues. In this context and seeking complementarity between health sciences and the emerging field of health humanities, this Symposium is promoted, which aims to recourse to historical knowledge to understand and help to live the difficult present time.

This role attributed to the humanities and historical studies has been highlighted in recent months in various initiatives (webinars, online conferences, special magazine numbers, interviews, opinion articles) carried out by various institutions and civil society, and in several countries.

This proposal is a joint initiative of two ongoing hospital and health history research projects: Hospitalis: Hospital architecture in Portugal (PTDC/ART-HIS/30808/2017)  (IR: Joana Balsa de Pinho; European Institute Culture Science Padre Manuel Antunes; ARTIS – Institute of History of Art, Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon) and Royal Hospital of All Saints: the city and health (IR’s: André Teixeira, Edite Martins Alberto, Rodrigo Banha da Silva; DPC-Lisbon City Council, CHAM – Center for Humanities, NOVA FCSH).

The event will be broadcast on CHAM’s YouTube channel:
June 18: https://youtu.be/txfwRs-4cio
June 19: https://youtu.be/fHfFQFBh0YI

Healthscaping team members Clair Weeda and Janna Coomans will present The Second Plague Pandemic: Mobility and Bottlenecks in Netherlandish Cities in the symposium on 19 June.

 

• “Rural Policing in Trecento Piedmont: A Forgotten Urban Gaze and Its Obstruction”

Thursday 23 April 2020, 08:00 CET
Seminar on Zoom

Medieval and Early Modern Studies Program seminar

Professor Guy Geltner Professor of Medieval History Monash University

Hinterlands’ role in the growth of cities emerges from a unique metabolic perspective and with rare lucidity thanks to the records of Piedmontese field wardens (campari) from the late thirteenth to the fifteenth century. Throughout the region enclosed by Italy’s Alpine ridges, these officials policed numerous sites and species in the service of cities’ biological as well as political agendas, as urban dwellers came to see the surrounding countryside, not only as a security belt providing military defense, but also as a rich source of caloric and hydraulic energy and a sink for waste. Reconstructing campari’s remits, norms and actions thus recovers a neglected urban gaze grounded in the era’s environmental thinking. Yet the process also sheds light on the tactics that rustics devised to obstruct it, for instance through self-help, concealment and strategic embellishment of reported violations. Campari records thus challenge the centrality of landed aristocracies in the area’s and era’s political historiography, while simultaneously inviting social and urban historians to look beyond the city walls.

 

• Symposium on Paleopathology, Disability, and Care

The next Paleopathology Association European Meeting will be held in the city of Vilnius, capital of Lithuania. The central theme for the conference will be “Paleopathology and its impact on medicine and society” and will focus on the importance of both scientific achievements and public outreach.

Abstracts shall be submitted until March 31, 2020, and they will be peer-reviewed by the Scientific Committee. We also encourage to submit proposals for symposia and workshops which shall offer an opportunity to present and discuss research on a particular topic (half-day or less). Selected symposia and /or workshops will take place either in the main venue of the meeting or Faculty of Medicine (Vilnius University) if they include an educational component and hands-on teaching opportunity.

Symposium # 1 | Paleopathology, Disability and Care

Organizers: Ileana Micarelli, Department of Environmental Biology, Sapienza, University of Rome; Lorna Tilley, Australian National University; Mary Anne Tafuri, Department of Environmental Biology, Sapienza, University of Rome

Description:
The past decade has seen growing interest in the ways disability and care were experienced in the past. Although to date most work in this area has been undertaken by prehistorians, a 2019 symposium on disability and care in Medieval times demonstrated the richness of theory and data available from the classical and post-classical world. This dedicated session seeks to bring together researchers from all time periods and cultures to build on this beginning, expanding aims, methods and perspectives in the field. In past times, dealing with the consequences of disease or injury, often caused or exacerbated by environmental and/or social constraints, placed significant demands on individuals, their families and their communities. How can we identify the likely impacts of pathology? Who received care? Who provided care? How were short-term needs met and longer-term caregiving sustained? How were people with visible impairments treated? How successful was the care available, and what might differences in access to care (and type of care provided) suggest about contemporary norms and values? Addressing questions such as these will deepen our understanding of past disability and care, a goal now part of a new agenda in bioarchaeology.
We envisage integrated poster and podium presentations, and call for contributions which engage with and/or extend theory and methodology in this area of bioarchaeological research. Descriptive case studies of disability and care are welcome as these are integral to comprehending individual, ‘on the ground’ experience, but may be best suited to a poster format.

 

• Medicine in the Medieval North Atlantic World

Maynooth University, Ireland
19–21 March 2020

This interdisciplinary conference explores the reception and transmission of medical knowledge between and across England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and Scandinavia during the medieval period, and will draw on history, literature, philosophy, science, religion, art, archaeology and manuscript studies. It will interrogate medical texts and ideas in both Latin and vernacular languages, addressing questions of translation, cultural and scientific inheritance and exchange, and historical conceptions of health and of the human being within nature.

Confirmed speakers: Dr Debby Banham (University of Cambridge); Prof. Guy Geltner (University of Amsterdam); Prof. Charlotte Roberts (Durham University)

Organising committee: Dr Sarah Baccianti (Queen’s University Belfast); Dr Siobhán Barrett, Dr Bernhard Bauer & Dr Deborah Hayden (Maynooth University)

 

• The MedHeal Seminar 2019: Public Health Development and Social Practice Patterns

Friday, September 20, 2019,  09:00–16:00.
Trondheim, University Museum (Vitenskapsmuseet)

Programme:

9.00-915: Axel Christophersen: Welcome, introduction to the MH seminar 2019: Task and expectations.

A. Short reports from WP 1: Nutrition and environment
9.15 – 9.45: Paula Utigard Sandvik: Plant remains and nutrition
9.45 -10.15 Terje Thun: Climate conditions: Stability and change
10.15-10.30: Coffee break
10.30-11.00: Marie Joseé Nadeau: the isotope analysis: Results and challenges (if any!)
11.00 -11.30: Summing up WP1: How to proceed?
11.30-12.15: Lunch at the SIT cafeteria (next to the venue place)

B. Short reports from WP2: Water, waste and infectious diseases
12.30 -13.00: Elisabeth: PdD-Status and plans
13.00 -13.30: Åshild Vågene: Report from the DNA-analysis: Status and potentials
13.30 -14.00: Sean Denham//Hege Hollund: Report from the osteo- and histo archaeological analysis: Status and potential
14.00-14.15: Coffee-break
14.15 -14.45: Plenum, summary WP 2: How to proceed?

C. Report from WP 3: Public health development and social practice patterns
14.45-15.15: Erik/Ole Georg: Summing up yesterday’s workshop: ideas and potential for future research.
15.15-15.30: Plenum, summary WP 3: How to proceed?
15.30-16.00: Summing up, the way forward

• Science and Medicine in the Insular Middle Ages

Queen’s University Belfast
7th December 2018

This one-day symposium focuses on the reception, transmission and translation of scientific and medical knowledge in the Insular Middle Ages. The papers presented overview a variety of subjects: Old and Middle English, Old and Middle Irish, Latin, Old Norse, Medieval Welsh, as well as archaeology, manuscript studies, historical linguistics,and history of science.

This symposium offers a platform of discussion for scholars interested in the reception and transmission of scientific and medical knowledge over several centuries and across borders in England, Ireland, Wales, and Scandinavia.

 

• Lecture and Masterclass with Monica H. Green on Black Death

• LA MEDICINA NEL BASSO MEDIOEVO TRADIZIONE E CONFLITTI

Cinquantacinquesimo
Convegno storico internazionale

LA MEDICINA 
NEL BASSO MEDIOEVO 
TRADIZIONE E CONFLITTI

TODI, 14 – 16 OTTOBRE 2018

 

Via dell’Arringo, snc – Palazzo Arroni
06049 Spoleto (PG)
Tel.: +39 0743.225630  Fax.: +39 0743.49902
cisam@cisam.org      www.cisam.org

Programma Convegno Download

Concorso a borse di studio Download

Applicazione del Regolamento UE n. 679/2016 in materia di protezione dei dati personali (GDPR)

Il Regolamento UE n. 679/2016 (General Data Protection Regulation – GDPR) costituisce lo strumento normativo individuato per uniformare la gestione e la sicurezza dei dati personali coinvolgendo tutti gli stati membri dell’Unione Europea ed è in sintesi volto a mantenere un maggior controllo sulla protezione, la sicurezza e la condivisione dei dati personali.

La Fondazione Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo (CISAM), la quale già tratta i dati personali dei propri iscritti e li conserva in modo sicuro, utilizzandoli esclusivamente per informare i medesimi sulle attività della Fondazione, in ottemperanza agli obblighi previsti dal predetto Regolamento UE n. 679/2016 (GDPR), entrato in vigore lo scorso 25 maggio, sta provvedendo all’adeguamento della propria politica sulla privacy per renderla in linea con i nuovi requisiti imposti dal provvedimento.

Sarà quindi cura della Fondazione informarvi, una volta perfezionato il processo di adeguamento, in merito alle nuove impostazioni di gestione dei dati personali ed alla prestazione del consenso in relazione alle diverse finalità del relativo trattamento, in conformità al Regolamento UE n. 679/2016.

 

 

• Representing Infirmity: Diseased Bodies in Renaissance and Early Modern Italy, Monash University, 13-15 December 2017

This conference represents the first analysis of how diseased bodies were represented in Italy during the ‘long Renaissance’, from the early 1400s through ca. 1650. Many individual studies by historians of art and medicine address specific aspects of this subject, yet there has never been an attempt to define or explore the broader topic. Moreover, most studies interpret Renaissance images and text through the lens of current notions about disease. This conference avoids the pitfalls of retrospective diagnosis, and looks beyond the modern category of ‘disease’ by viewing ‘infirmity’ in Galenic humoural terms. Papers explore what infirmities were depicted in visual culture, in what context, why, and when. Specific examples consider the idealized body altered by disease, and the relationship between the depiction of infirmities through miracle cures and through medical treatment. Speakers also examine how and why these representations change across media and over time. Thus, certain types of diseased bodies appear often in votive images, but never in altarpieces or sculptures; representations of wounds and sores grow increasingly less graphic and frequent, but with notable exceptions. Finally, it explores how the development of greater knowledge of the workings and structure of the body in this period, through, for example, the growth of anatomy, was reflected in changing ideas and representations of the metaphorical, allegorical, and symbolic meanings of infirmity and disease. The conference addresses the construction of the notion of disease, and aims to present a new paradigm for the field.

The event is open to all and free of charge, no reservation required.

Link to the event: http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/the-body-in-the-city/events/